Tarantino's Penchant for Pastiche

One of the contenders for this year's Best Picture Oscar was Quentin Tarantino's epic film The Hateful Eight. In true Tarantino form, this is a delightfully violent, and colossal who-dun-it that also happens to rely heavily upon pastiche*. Quentin Tarantino has done this masterfully with his allusions to the popular Bruce Lee martial arts movies, using David Carradine in Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2, and to Blaxpoitives with Pulp Fiction. Tarantino has, on many occasions, admitted that he steals from every movie he has ever watched and yet his directorial style somehow twists each homage into something uniquely his own.

The Hateful Eight incorporates elements reminiscent to both Leonard Elmore's popular Raylan Givens westerns and to Agatha Christie's classic mysteries featuring Hercule Poirot. Yet this Jacobean whodunit, set in the aftermath of the Confederate War with Tarantino fav's Tim Roth, Walton Goggins, and Samuel L Jackson, could have just as easily been set in a Victorian manor, with Tarantino choosing to set this in the wild west of Wyoming. It is this blending of genres that gives fans of each genre--the western and the murder mystery--a refreshing experience since the traditional formulae are abandoned.

The Hateful Eight tells the story of eight principal characters, all strangers to each other who seek refuge in Millie's Haberdashery as a blizzard moves through the wilds of Wyoming. All eight characters clearly have a past filled with violence, and it is this violence, and the threat of violence that in actuality acts as the authority figure exercising control over this group. And true to form, Tarantino judiciously punctuates the film with gratuitous displays of the violence for which he is renown.

Story aside, this movie is a perfect example of a current popular film that employs pastiche as a story telling device. At first glance it is evident there are many of the trademark western trappings: the Sheriff--Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the outlaw**--Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the bounty men--John Ruth (Kurt Russel) and Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a stagecoach, and the majestic and threatening frontier itself. However Tarantino abandons the traditional good guy vs bag guy Cowboys and Indians and presents his audience with only the "bad guys/gal", any of which are capable of arousing the audience's sympathies.

However, if this is a true example of pastiche, where does the second element lie? Tarantino weaves the Agatha Christie'esque story line into his wintry western setting, creating a meandering plot for the characters to navigate.


First, we have an ever growing circle of strangers thrust together by the elements and among this circle of strangers there is a killer lying in wait much like Christie's And Then There Were None--also published under the names Ten Little Indians and Ten Little N------s ( curiously, an epithet used liberally throughout The Hateful Eight). How do we know the killer is lying in wait? It would not be a Tarantino film without glorified and frivolous carnage. And as the story progresses, we see the careful deductions: who has the means and motive, and who is Domergue's accomplice?

During the film, one of Domergue's accomplices slips poison into the coffee to murder, in graphic style, her intended victim but without care for who may or may not consume the toxin. Likewise, Christie was notorious for employing poison as her tool for murder. Novels that come to mind are Curtain and Five Little Pigs--riffing again on the use of a number in the title--in which Christie offs her victims with poison.

Now it becomes evident that Domergue has more than one accomplice and this meshes nicely with Murder on the Orient Express, where our hero Poirot comes to recognize that every person on the the train has reason to want the victim dead but unlike Poirot's suspects, Domergue and her fellow conspirators are not granted immunity for their murderous past.

And finally, as I mentioned earlier, Tarantino plays with numbers in the title The Hateful Eight, or more specifically the use of a number in the title. The Hateful Eight calls to mind The Magnificent Seven but is more likely a double down on the title The Big Four in which a minor character by the name of Dr. Quentin claims to be an admirer of Poirot, just as Tarantino quite evidently appears to be an admirer of Agatha Christie with his latest blockbuster.

We are left then with another classic black comedy from Tarantino, cleverly peppered with pop culture references, filled with violent tension, and fabulous dialogue all set primarily in one room. Tarantino reworks these two genres, appropriating elements from each into what is now a recognizable style of his own, and true to form Tarantino ends it all with a fabulous Fuck Yeah! bloodbath in the end.

*Pastiche, a popular post modernism literary device that is not parody, but is instead a borrowing or blending of ideas into a collage that gives tribute to any given genre.

** Intriguingly, Tarantino twists that up too, using a female for his baddy which due to the violence caused some uproar, resulting in some describing Tarantino as a misogynist.